While this first Sunday of Advent marks the start of the Christmas season for people in many places of the world, we hear that after a two-day blackout the internet and telephone services have been restored in Syria. Clashes are reported from Homs, Damascus, Aleppo and other regions.

He was born in Damascus in 1956 and lives in London where he works as a journalist. With all the changes his poetry went through, not at least because of the geographic location changes, it is characterised by a constant: a child’s perspective, in the sense of a direct, unmasking gaze that finds a very unique approach to questions, the world, love and time.